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So finally I’ve decided to release xfce4-clipman-plugin 1.4.0, which is the Gtk+3 port of the plugin. For a while I was unsure whether to do a development or a stable release – to be clear: this was not a decision based on the stability of the product itself but the fact that it relied on the development release of a Xfce core component (libxfce4ui-4.13.0). However I decided to revert the commit that introduced the dependency (I will apply it again latest when 4.14 is out).

As the port is a 1:1 port there are practically no new features. The only notable difference is that the panel plugin’s icon is now a symbolic icon.

Thanks to Eric, Steve and Florian for helping me get this off the ground!

libxfce4ui 4.13.1

This is only a smaller bugfix release that replaces a deprecated call and – more importantly – fixes the default theming of XfceHeading in all Gtk+3 settings dialogs of Xfce.

This release came a bit sooner than expected, but it’s primary goal is to fix a showstopper regression which slipped into 0.3.1 and practically rendered xfce4-notifyd useless on systems with Gtk+3 <=3.18 (i.e. not showing any notifications). Thanks to Olivier for noticing immediately and posting a patch!

the “Retro” and “Bright” themes

But while this had to be a fast release I still managed to put in some feature-goodness. For instance I came through on my promise to add more default themes and in this release I added “Retro” and “Bright“.

(symbolic) audio volume icon recolored ZOMG-PONIES! style

The biggest feature in this release however is the support for symbolic icons. For those of you who haven’t heard of the feature before: it’s basically Gtk+ coloring your icon with the color of the font of that particular context, so the icon will color-wise match the font. This is especially useful for monochrome icons and (usually) prevents white-on-white scenarios. It also gives users and theme-makers more freedom (instead of having a “dark panel” or a separate “dark notifications” variant of an icon-theme). Note that your notification-sending application also has to request a symbolic icon, xfce4-notifyd is not enforcing symbolic icons.

Another notable fix (that I forgot to mention in the release notes) is the fix of styles of the progressbars in notifications. Those were not styled according to the notifyd-theme selected but always used the style of the base (as in: screen-wide) Gtk+ theme.

Finally, a minor improvement is that all themes are now sorted alphabetically in the Settings Dialog.

With this bugfix release out of the way it won’t be long until I merge my feature branch and get more testing for the “Do not disturb” mode.

On the plate for the next release are more default themes (hint: “Retro” has already been pushed to git master) and potentially the per-application settings and “Do not disturb” mode which I previously teased. The latter might also warrant a major version number bump so we’ll see whether it’ll really end up in 0.3.2.

As previously announced I’ve been working on per-application settings and a “Do not disturb” mode for xfce4-notifyd, which is Xfce’s notification daemon.

Finally I’ve come to a point where I’m ok with pointing to the code and encouraging people to try it and spot potential issues with it. As both of these features have been long-time requested I hope it’ll make quite a few people happy. I know I’ve been quite happy myself since I can use it

The way that the “known applications” are handled by xfce4-notifyd is that they are remembered once they have sent a notification. This means that you can only mute applications which have – at some point since you’ve been running the code from the branch – actually sent notifications. I’ve been previously thinking about trying to collect all potential candidates somehow but this turned out too pesky and personally I think most users will want to mute those applications that send notifications often and those will quickly appear in that (alphabetically sorted) list.

Caveats: Some of this isn’t final – I might still be updating the wording on some of the labels or even some of the functionality might be amended a little, but generally I’m quite pleased with how things are working. Furthermore there may be memory leaks, I just haven’t had the time to really get to that (bugreports and patches are warmly welcomed ;)).

If you have feedback or suggestions please feel free to add some comments to this post or contact me on other communication channels.